gchallen Past Events

Screening and Discussion of Self-Portrait: Dying at 47 KM with Director Zhang Mengqi

章夢奇《自畫像：47公里之死》放映暨映後談


Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-moderator: Yiping Lin, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, September 30, 2024
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower
The discussion will be conducted in English and Mandarin Chinese (with translation).

“Self-Portrait: Dying at 47 KM” is the fifth film of Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portraits” series made in her hometown village which she named 47KM, near Suizhou in Hubei Province. This year, her grandpa passed away. What does the village mean to her without her grandpa? She started to search for stories about death in the village: unnatural deaths in history, bizarre deaths in reality, and deaths fuelled by hatred … “In the mundane daily life accompanied by so many deaths,” she asks, “how should she understand death?”

Zhang Mengqi is a filmmaker and choreographer. She has participated in The Folk Memory Project since 2011 and has curated and co-organized the “Film for Mother” Festival since 2021. Zhang has made 11 feature-length documentaries known as the “Self-Portraits series”, a decade-long creative documentation about her hometown village near Suizhou City, Hubei Province. Her films have been selected by Cinéma du Réel, Visions du Réel, BFI London Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image, and have won awards at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, and Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, among others. Her choreographic work has been performed at the Foundation CULTURESCAPES (Switzerland), Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (France), ImPuls Tanz (Vienna), and Eurokaz (Croatia).

導演自述：
這是我在「47公里」創作的第五部影片。這一年我的爺爺過世了，沒有了爺爺的村子對我代表什麼？因為爺爺的過世，我開始在村子裡尋找死亡故事。歷史中的非正常死亡、現實中離奇的死亡、由仇恨發酵的死亡……在這樣一個由無數「死亡」組成的日常生活中，我該如何來理解死亡？

章夢奇，紀錄片和劇場創作者。 自 2010 年起參與「民間記憶計劃」, 2021 年起策劃並聯合組織「母親影展」。章夢奇的「自畫像」系列紀錄片和劇場創作以其家鄉湖北省隨州市殷店鎮釣魚台村——「47公里」為基點，在探尋歷史與照亮現實之間持續長達13年的創作。

《自畫像》系列紀錄片作品曾多次入選法國真實電影節、瑞士尼翁真實電影節、BFI 倫敦電影節等；並獲得韓國 DMZ 紀錄片電影節國際最佳紀錄片白鵝獎 ，釜山國際電影節最佳紀錄片獎，西班牙 Punto de Vista 電影節最佳導演及觀眾選擇獎，山形國際紀錄片電影節國際競賽單元優秀獎等。「自畫像」系列劇場作品曾在瑞士 Foundation CULTURESCAPES 藝術節，法國青年舞蹈交流季，維也納 ImPuls Tanz 舞蹈節，克羅埃西亞 ZKM 青年劇場等國際戲劇舞蹈節演出。

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gchallen CFP

Hong Kong, China, and New Orientalisms

fourth annual postgraduate student workshop CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, a short bio, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by September 25, 2024.

The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong invites abstracts for participation in its fourth annual postgraduate student workshop:

Hong Kong, China, and New Orientalisms
14-16 November 2024 (Online)

Edward Said’s field-defining 1978 book, Orientalism, revealed how Western European scholarship on ‘the East’ created a homogenous and exotic world that legitimised Western European empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Said focused specifically on orientalist scholarship – now called ‘area studies’, of the ‘Middle East’ and ‘South Asia’ – we may productively extend his insights to East Asia, and most notably, China.

Despite China’s status as a global power in the twenty-first century, orientalist discourses have often undermined its position in international relations. At the same time, China has relied on these same orientalist narratives to assert its autonomy and difference from ‘the West’. The persistent binary of ‘East’ and ‘West’, as well as the hierarchies it produces, has been an obstacle to transnational cooperation in the face of the most pressing global challenges: climate change, war, political instability, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Since the nineteenth century, Hong Kong has been the place where ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ – or more accurately, where the two sides of orientalist discourse – meet. Hong Kong has wrestled with its many hybrid identities, colonial histories, and questions of political belonging. Extending the insights of Said’s Orientalism while remaining attentive to significant cultural, political and historical differences, we seek to critically evaluate new orientalisms of the twenty-first century and their various effects in China and Hong Kong. ‘New orientalisms’ might refer to (but is not limited to):

–        Postcolonial orientalism
–        Anticolonial and decolonial orientalism
–        Urban orientalism
–        Epidemic orientalism
–        Medical orientalism
–        Tech orientalism
–        World literary orientalism
–        Environmental orientalism
–        Political orientalism
–        Legal orientalism
–        Media orientalism
–        Sports orientalism 
–        East Asian/Area Studies orientalism
–        Self-orientalism

We invite papers that engage with ‘new orientalisms’ (including new orientalisms not listed here) as well as papers that consider narratives beyond orientalism, critical area studies, and re-evaluations of Orientalism in the context of East Asia. 

The HKU Comparative Literature postgraduate workshop offers PhD and advanced MPhil students the chance to receive detailed feedback on their work in progress from their peers and senior faculty. The workshop is small (12-15 students) and the atmosphere is collegial. The three-day workshop is held over Zoom and we aim for geographical diversity.

The senior faculty respondents for the Fall 2024 workshop are:

Dan Vukovich 胡德 is Chairperson of the University of Hong Kong’s Comparative Literature department, and the Director of HKU’s China, Humanities, and Global Studies Research Hub. He is an inter-disciplinary scholar, trained in cultural studies and theory, and he specializes in colonialism/imperialism/politics in relation to the China-West problem.

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship and teaching lie at the intersection of the following subfields: postcolonial literature and theory; decolonisation and the global Cold War in Asia; city literatures and the urban humanities; transpacific migration; and Marxism and critical theory. 

Marco Wan is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersections between law and the humanities, especially law and literature, law and film, and the ways in which perspectives from the humanities shed light on the legal regulation of gender and sexuality.

Please submit your abstract (up to 250 words) with a working title, a short bio, and your CV to conf.complit.hku@gmail.com by September 25, 2024. Selected participants will be notified of their acceptance by October 1 and should submit the full paper by October 30. There are no fees to attend the workshop.

The graduate workshop will be held on Zoom from November 14-16, 5-8 pm HKT. Papers will be circulated in advance among all the participants. Attendees are expected to read the papers of their panel before the workshop and give feedback during the panels.

If you have any queries, please kindly email Lory Wong (u3009336@connect.hku.hk) or J. Daniel Elam (jdelam@hku.hk).

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gchallen Past Events

Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985

Speaker:
Jennifer Dorothy Lee, Associate Professor of East Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Respondent:
Angie C. Baecker, Research Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese History and Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, September 23, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

Excessive worry. Persistent unease. Disquiet. Torment. A brain disorder. Just another ordinary feeling. Based on Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s new book, this talk will address the competing connotations and nomenclatures of the anxiety in Anxiety Aesthetics in twentieth-century China. Arguing that anxiety offers a crucial frame for perceiving the specificities of both contemporaneity and creative practices in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Lee hones in on the late 1970s and early 1980s, in particular, the Beijing Spring, as both a springboard and specific site for post-revolutionary transformations. How does anxiety inscribe art forms generated by socialist histories? How does anxiety, in turn, socialize art?

Jennifer Dorothy Lee is Associate Professor of East Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lee’s first book, Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985, was published in February 2024 by the University of California Press. Lee’s article on socialist abstraction and the painter Wu Guanzhong was also recently published in positions: asia critique. Lee’s next research project, tentatively titled Diasporic Longing, will take up a transnational cultural memoir of family, migrancy, and music across China, Taiwan, France, and the US from the 1940s-1970s.

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gchallen Past Events

Edward Lam on Eileen Chang and (the Disappearance of) Time

現在海枯石爛也很快

——劇場導演林奕華談張愛玲與時間（的消失）

分享嘉賓 Speaker: Mr. Edward LAM 林奕華

主持人 Moderator: Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村 (Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU)

與談人Respondent: Prof. Pei-yin LIN 林姵吟 (School of Chinese, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: September 21, 2024 (Sat) 15:00-17:00pm
語言 Language: Putonghua 普通話 
地點 Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, Main Campus, HKU 香港大學黃麗松講堂

摘要 Abstract:
都說張愛玲的小說最難映象化，林奕華卻六度把她的原著，轉化成劇場裏的《心經》（香港首部改編張愛玲舞台劇）、《兩女性》（《金鎖記/怨女》）、《華麗緣》、《張愛玲、請留言》、《半生緣》又是關錦鵬電影《紅玫瑰白玫瑰》的編劇。由文字到聲光與影畫，原來是林奕華在張愛玲身上找到靈感，又讓靈感回歸張愛玲的密碼所在：什麼是時間？

The eminent playwright and multimedia artist Edward Lam has adapted Eileen Chang’s fiction for both stage and screen six times, more than anyone in the Chinese-speaking world. From written words to light, shadows, and sounds, Lam’s adaption opens a path that leads to a uniquely profound way to decode Chang’s original texts.

講者簡介 About the Speaker:
林奕華  香港多媒介創作人。先後編導了「中國四大名著系列」，張艾嘉《華麗上班族之生活與生存》、《聊齋Why We Chat》、吳彥祖《快樂王子》、梁詠琪《大娛樂家》、劉若英《紅娘的異想世界之在西廂》，音樂劇《梁祝的繼承者們》。近作是改編楊德昌電影《一一》的《一一三部曲》，和《A.I時代的梁祝與繼承者們》。

Edward Lam founded Zuni Icosahedron with friends in the early 1980s and established Edward Lam Dance Theatre, where he serves as the artistic director, during his residence in London (1989-1995). Since returning to Hong Kong in 1995, he has devoted himself to theatre and directed more than 70 original productions. Lam was awarded Best Director at Shanghai theatre festival Modern Drama Valley’s One Drama Awards on several occasions, including for Men and Women, War and Peace (2010), The Doppelgänger (2012), and What is Sex? (2017), and was named Artist of the Year (Theatre) by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2017. A firm believer in education, Lam has given lectures at The University of Hong Kong, the Academy of Film at Hong Kong Baptist University, and The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. In 2015, he launched the first edition of ELDT On Screen, a cinematic showcase of four of his adaptations of literary classics. He has also published books of collected essays, including Waiting for Hong Kong, The Meaning of Entertainment, Evil But Glamorous, My TV Dinner Years, and Leading Ladies in the Mandarin Cinema. In 2016, Taiwanese journal Performing Arts Review published Who is Afraid of Edward Lam, Hsu Yen-mei’s analysis of Lam’s stage productions from 2006 to 2015.

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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gchallen Past Events

What remains?

Presentation and Discussion of the Performance-Lecture (untitled) by Kai Tuchmann

Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, September 16, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

(untitled) is the second of three performance lectures about documents in theatre. With (untitled), Kai Tuchmann moves towards a metaphysics of the documentary. The starting point is Gao Zipeng’s film “Geleshan,” which documents a collective of artists who met in the mountains of Chongqing in 2018 for a durational performance involving the firing of ceramics. Most of the participating artists began this performance by burning documents that were closely linked to personal experiences of illness and despair. Kai Tuchmann was one of the artists depicted in the film. Six years after this meeting in the mountains of Chongqing, Kai revisits this film. Juxtaposing the documented past of “Geleshan” with the present moment of his performance lecture, Kai`s work is asking the question of what lies at the core of documentation? What is it that comes to light beyond the visibility of the surfaces of our bodies and actions?

About Kai Tuchmann
Kai Tuchmann graduated in directing from Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch in Berlin. As a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, he helped develop the curriculum for the BA Dramaturgy program there. Kai has also researched the history of dramaturgy as a Fulbright Scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University New York, and in 2024 he has been a curator for the Ludics Seminar at Harvard University. He works as a dramaturg, director and academic. In his internationally shown documentary theater works, Kai has explored the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in contemporary China, the impact of urbanization on migrant workers in Europe and Asia, and the role of the body in the face of digital technologies. His stagings and dramaturgies were invited, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong, Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival, Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Kunstfest Weimar, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wuzhen Theatre Festival and documenta-institute. He is the co-translator of Li Yinan`s 当代剧场访谈录 Juchang Performance in Contemporary Chinese Society (1980–2020). His recent publication is the edited volume Postdramatic Dramaturgies – Resonances between Asia and Europe (transcript, 2022).

Credits:
(untitled) is deeply impacted through the works of and conversations with Gao Zipeng, Boris Nikitin, Wu Meng, Yao Bo, and Zhao Chuan.

Photo caption:
Kai Tuchmann in February 2024 during his Performance–Lecture To Wake Up The Archives! at the Alliance Française de Bandung, Indonesia

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gchallen Upcoming Events

Loves that Cannot be Named: Symbolic Subversions in Priya Sen’s Yeh Freedom Life

Speaker: Ani Maitra, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Colgate University

Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

This talk examines Priya Sen’s film Yeh Freedom Life (2018) as an experimental ethnography of sexual subalternity in contemporary India. The talk focuses on the film’s grounding of female same-sex desire in postcolonial working-class Delhi, specifically its representation of that desire at a critical distance from the discourse of queer rights and identity politics. Completed the same year that the Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality emphasizing the individual’s “right to privacy,” Sen’s film captures the complex socioeconomic dynamics shaping the lives of its protagonists and reveals the limits of normative distinctions between the public and the private, straight and queer. The talk argues that it is the film’s “non-liberal” representation of the sexual subaltern–a figure that at once inhabits and subverts North Indian Hindu normativity on the fringes of liberal Anglophone activism–that makes it a timely decolonial feminist and queer intervention.

Ani Maitra is an associate professor of film and media studies at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. His research and teaching fall at the intersections of postcolonial and diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and global media studies. Maitra is the author of Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital (Northwestern UP, 2020).

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gchallen Past Events

Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India

Speaker:
Aakriti Mandhwani, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR

Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Monday, September 9, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

Everyday Reading: Middlebrow magazines and Book publishing in Post-Independence India captures the significant and yet largely unexplored world of commercially successful print and publishing in post-Independence India. It examines the world of “middlebrow” commercial publishing and practices of reading of North Indian middle-classes in the 1950s and 60s, the decades immediately following Indian independence in 1947. While the immediate post-Independence period in India has been studied largely from the perspective of planning, policy, and the partition, the overarching and dominant critical narrative that emerges from the period emphasises sacrifice over personal pleasure, marking each citizen’s unconditional contribution to the nation’s growth. However, it was also a time when middle class selves were being re-imagined, and re-articulated themselves, in multiple ways. Taking as its focus the form and content of a range of bestselling middlebrow magazines and paperbacks in Hindi, Everyday Reading constructs an alternative story for the 1950s: one that is marked by consumption. The book argues that the middle classes who read these publications were everyday active consumers who defied the state’s prescriptions, carving their roles outside the logic of the austere nation.

Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.

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